It was a childhood play.The players stand around a large circle drawn with chalk.When the referee of the game says "In the pond" the children will jump inside the circle. When he/she says "on the banks", they have to jump out.After repeating the same few times ,the referee will unexpectedly repeat in the pond..or on the banks twice.The careless will be trapped and they go out.The game goes on,just like our lives.So one has to be vigilant to be in tune with the referee at the remote end!

Thursday, August 28, 2014

The Nehrus and Gandhis, an Indian Dynasty-PII

Gandhiji: In the short
prologue to the book, the author states that Mahatma Gandhi was “cunning and
foxy”-to which I do not concur.

-The great man was a ruthless politician. He had a
fixed notion as to how independence should be won and he would tolerate nothing
that stood in the way of that. For Gandhi, right from the beginning, a
negotiated settlement for British withdrawal was the only possible exit route.
This meant a peaceful transition to independence”.These words made me feel
that Gandhiji was the reincarnation of Chanakya or Machiavelli!

-Gandhi was not so much a peasant as a fox. He was an
extremely shrewd and intelligent political leader.

-Gandhi began to idealise the prehistory of Hinduism,
in which it is impossible to disentangle facts from mythology.

- Gandhi increasingly appeared to be a mongrel
offspring of Victorian liberalism and Indian mysticism.

-Gandhi became a decisive link between the old and new
India, between the peasants and the colonial state, between Jawaharlal Nehru
and India’s strongest capitalist class. He was the man who held the whole act
together. It would have been impossible to find another like him. He took the
village to the metropolis and in the process became the country’s leading power
broker.

Gandhi vs Nehru-The confrontation between Gandhi and Nehru was in
fact the confrontation between tradition and modernism. The difference of
opinion between the two was sharp, but at the end Nehru always succumbed to the
Great man.

-the difference between Nehru and Gandhi, these 2
giants of India’s Nationalist movement couldn’t have been greater. The first
was a Kashmiri Brahmin who discarded every religious inhibition. The older man
was a Gujerathi Bania (trading caste) who had toyed with doubt, but then
re-embraced orthodoxy. Nehru, a product of Harrow and Cambridge, was tempered
by his lengthy stays in numerous British prisons; Gandhiji was a product largely of Hindu India, but had
learnt politics thru his South African
experiences. Gandhiji regarded religion as a crucial to everyday
existence. Nehru saw it as India’s deadliest enemy, containing the seeds of
destruction.

-Unlike Gandhi, Nehru did not believe that men and
women should exercise strict sexual self-discipline and he had publicly
attacked Gandhi on these questions in sharp language.

-How Nehru cursed the caste system? Gandhi had denounced the absurd practices of
the system and its taboos, but never challenged the caste division as a whole.
Nehru frequently did, arguing that it was a distorted, degenerate reflection of
Hinduisms prehistory.

'It’s dangerous to be too good' was the Great Bernard
Shaw’s response on the news of Gandhiji’s assassination (This is not from the
book-it’s my general knowledgeJ).
Since Nehru’s emotional speech, with tears in his eyes, after the assassination
of Gandhiji is very much available in
net, I don’t intend to requote it.

-With Gandhiji’s death, there was no one left whom Nehru
regarded as superior, whose reprimands and advice he could accept.